I recently completed my new novel Magenta and brought the book out in handsome coil-bound photocopies, each copy signed and lavishly numbered, available through my web site or by bumping into me in Mendocino and arranging an exchange.
Posts published in “Essays”
Cattails. I saw them for the first time this summer. A patch was growing on the south bank, another at the end of the small island that lies near the river’s mouth that’s currently blocked by sand. Cattails exist on the periphery of ponds and marshes. They are abundantly seen in bogs. Cattails are often deliberately planted in slow, effluent-bearing streams flowing from wastewater treatment plants. Cattails remove nutrients—usually ammonia from animal waste or fertilizers. Ammonia accelerates algae growth. Unfortunately—as yet—there are not enough cattails to remove the nutrients in the estuarine mouth of the Navarro River.
A fixed surveillance camera, recording in Cleveland on November 22, 2014, captured a 12-year-old African-American boy, Tamir Rice, pointing a toy gun at imaginary targets. The boy was playing alone in a snowy park pavilion…
The staggering incoherence of the election campaign only mirrors the shocking incapacity of the American public, from top to bottom, to process the tendings of our time. The chief tending is permanent worldwide economic contraction.…
So it’s Friday and I’m having one of those mornings where I feel certain the universe is an all-powerful sentient being picking on me for no good reason. Put another way, I’m feeling sorry for…
“Adults should face the fact that they don't like adolescents,” wrote Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, shortly after the Columbine school shooting in 1999, “and that they have used high school to isolate the…
Though there are far fewer examples of apples today than when I was a boy it is good to know that last weekend's gathering in Boonville was still called the Mendocino County Fair and Apple…